Embodiments of the present invention relate to communication systems. More particularly, embodiments provide an emulator for forward error correction (FEC) techniques.
Over the last few decades, the use of communication networks has increased dramatically. In the early days Internet, popular applications were limited to emails, bulletin board, and mostly informational and text-based web page surfing, and the amount of data transferred was usually relatively small. Today, Internet and mobile applications demand a huge amount of bandwidth for transferring photo, video, music, and other multimedia files. For example, a social network like FACEBOOK processes more than 500 TB of data daily. With such high demands on data and data transfer, existing data communication systems are to be improved to address these needs.
Recent Ethernet standards use Forward Error Correcting (FEC) codes to improve the Bit Error Ratio (BER) of links. One example of such a correction code is the GF10 Reed-Solomon FEC.
Unfortunately, conventional Bit Error Rate Testers (BERTs) may not support the generation of FEC encoded data. Rather, they only produce (and count errors for) Pseudo-Random Binary Sequences (PRBS) patterns.
PRBS are known repeating patterns that allow easy detection of bit errors by comparing the received sequence with a predicted sequence. BERTs use this property to determine the BER of electrical or optical links.
However, the BER performance of new Ethernet standards based on GF10 Reed Solomon (RS) FEC may be dependent on the distribution of errors on the link (in particular the “burstiness” of the errors), rather than simply upon the overall BER. This property makes it difficult to predict the post-FEC BER from the pre-FEC BER results produced by a BERT.